Boost the involvement of your teams

Teamwork is not always a guarantee of effectiveness. Yet there are enterprises where the team members pull each other towards the top. How can you use these experiences to develop teams that are deeply involved and in search of excellence?

For a long time, team motivation was not a major concern for enterprises. In a working world structured around a principle of command and control, there were the order givers on one hand, and the subordinates on the other. Performance was quite a binary notion: the latter were executing the task handed out to them, or were not.

This era now seems over. Vertical hierarchies have been overcome by the need to get autonomous and creative staff to work together. And their commitment has become a constant concern in most organizations—a variable to optimize, because the success of the enterprise depends on it.

Indeed, the involvement of the teams and their smooth operation are anything but random. They do not either entirely depend on the qualities or the competencies of their members. They mostly stem from a complex combination of factors: the ambition to make a difference, a shared culture that cements the group, a clear vision of everyone’s roles and responsibilities, a working atmosphere that is both demanding and convivial, etc.

Some enterprises, such as Zappos, Alibaba, Whole Foods or Patagonia, have succeeded in setting up these conditions. If their initial success probably owed a lot to their marketing flair or to their innovation capacity, it is undoubtedly the involvement of their teams that then enabled them to replicate those success factors, again and again, until these companies became envied models. Studying these cases provides precious teachings. How do these organizations look at their mission? What is their culture? How do they put their teams together? What working rules have they adopted? How do they thwart the traps that teams, even the best ones, get traditionally caught in?